Kotaro Isaka’s thriller Bullet Train moves as fast as the train—the Shinkansen—it takes place on and is named after. Already destined to be a movie starring the not-very-Japanese Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock (one imagines some changes en route), Bullet Train, a guilty pleasure if there ever were one, is something of a cross between…
Opium’s role in the history of East Asia has been well-documented, most notably perhaps in Julia Lovell’s definitive 2011 book The Opium War. This, and others like it, deal with the issue mostly from the perspective of the consuming countries, in particular China; Thomas Manuel’s Opium Inc. is noteworthy in focusing just as much on…
Anthony Barbieri-Low starts his book comparing ancient Egypt and early China by saying it was a somewhat off-the-wall thing to do.
“China’s new global status as a rising technology power”, as the editors of this new study put it, has increasingly engendered alarmed, if not alarmist, rhetoric by Western politicians and commentators. The combined response of Innovation and China’s Global Emergence, a new collection of academic essays that attempts a ground-up review of the issue, might…
Viewed from a perch in Hong Kong, one of the most striking things about Lion City, Jeevan Vasagar’s new book on Singapore, Hong Kong’s best frenemy, is that it includes nary a mention of Asia’s World City.
It is tempting to see Anuk Arudpragasam’s new novel A Passage North, set in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, as having political intent. It undoubtedly does: it is set around the dutiful visit of Krishan, a Tamil living in Colombo, to Sri Lanka’s war-scarred Northern Province for the funeral of Rani, his…
Vijay Gokhale retired as India’s Foreign Secretary in 2020 after nearly four decades in the diplomatic corps, specializing in China, including a posting as Indian Ambassador in Beijing, experience much in evidence in his recent thoughtful and surprisingly frank book on Sino-Indian diplomacy.
China’s increasingly dominant position in global economic and political affairs has so far not been matched by similar progress in international use of either the Chinese currency or language. This can at times seem curious to some of those charting China’s rise. Jeffrey Gil of Adelaide’s Flinders University offers The Rise of Chinese as a…
Musica Viva’s new production of Norma—Vincenzo Bellini at his bel canto best—is perhaps an omen: it is just one letter shy of “normal”.
Among the most unsettling words that can come at the end of a 600-page procedural crime thriller are: “End of Volume One”.
Whether or not an explicit counter to current attempts to define a Hindu nationalist version of Indian identity, recent books for the general reader that present a nuanced multi-millennium, multi-everything story of Indian history are a welcome trend. While Tony Joseph deployed recent genetics research in Early Indians: The Story Of Our Ancestors And Where…
The papers are currently full of articles and commentary on the ever-closer relationship between China and Russia, of their compatible economies, state visits, joint projects, shared geopolitical interests and camaraderie between their leaders.
The cover of Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present, with its photo of the massive walls of the Ark Fortress in Bukhara, is something of a bait and switch. The book flies through that period implied by picture: the “imperial conquests” of the subtitle are not those of Genghis…
Lindsey Miller spent two years in North Korea from 2017 to 2019 when her husband was posted to the British Embassy in Pyongyang. Miller (some research reveals) has a career of her own (she is currently musical director at the Royal Shakespeare Company) and finding herself (one supposes) somewhat at loose ends as a diplomatic…
When Micaëla comes on Act III, looking for the estranged Don José at the smugglers’ camp, she sings that Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante—“I tell myself that nothing will frighten me”. One could sense, in this, its first full-staged production in eighteen months, Opera Hong Kong telling itself much the same thing.